Saying goodbye to our old house was harder than I would have thought. Truth is though, that in recent years, I've spent less and less time there, only really stopping in for family meals or get togethers.
Still. 29 years is a long time and there are a lot of memories soaked into the walls of that house. Most of my own childhood, my teens, my 20s. I grew up in this house. I went to school from this house, opened my Christmas presents from Santa in this house, brought girlfriends back to this house, returned to this house from my travels, cried uncontrollably the day my Dad died. With every high or low point in my life, the house was always there. A mix of monument and safety net.
A week later and it still seems odd that I can't drop in on my way to the town centre, or collect something of mine. It may just be a house but it was part of our family's life for a long time and helped shape who we all became.
In the days before the move, I had been photographing the house. I didn't want to forget anything in the coming years. I didn't want to forget any of the tiny details that made it our house. In truth, the house had changed so much since we were kids that some parts of it were almost unrecognisable from back then, but if you looked closely enough, at the ceilings, at the corners on the floor, it was still the house that homed a family for nearly 30 years.
The house had character. It was an old building, built in the late 19th century. So some of the walls were a bit wonky and things didn't line up exactly the way they were meant to. Of course, this is why the house felt like a member of the family in its own right, rather than just a building where we slept and ate.
When photographing it, I wanted to photograph how we had seen the house. Anything else would have missed the point.
Looking for these photographs was bringing back memories. Memories of hanging over the stairs, talking to whoever was standing down below. This drop was also the most efficient way to get dirty clothes from upstairs to downstairs to get washed.
Growing up, I spent a lot of time looking up at the ceiling in my bedroom. I started to see shapes and how the light interacted with the imperfections of the walls.
It's not something I do as an adult. Too busy trying to get enough sleep before work tomorrow to worry about tracing the lines around the room.
When I took these photographs, I realised that I'll probably never be as acquainted with another house again. As children, we seek out the tiny gaps between floor boards and imagine them as chasms. Or the indentation of a ceiling and see it as an overhanging cliff. As adults, houses tend to provide function, more than anything else.
When I think of how much of our lives was spent in the house, I also think how many other things came and went in that time. Two dogs lived their entire lives there. Several fish and a guinea pig were there too. Then there were the trees. Planted to provide privacy when flats were built looking over our garden, they were cut down before the sale to avoid causing problems for any potential buyers. I counted 21 rings in that tree stump. I'm no arborist (thank you, Google) but looking at those tree rings, I wonder if I could map out the last 21 years of our lives here.
It was a big house. Almost certainly bigger than any house I'll ever be able to buy. It meant we had space from each other to do our own thing. There were four of us in there and while we obviously had the fallings out of every family, we weren't tripping over each other. God knows how we would have turned out if we'd been forced together in a confined space.
And it was a generally beautiful house. It wouldn't win any awards as I think it was a pretty standard middle class home when constructed but the high ceilings and large windows allowed in so much light. I used it as a studio a few times for that reason. Any time I showed another photographer the photos that I'd taken in the house, the first thing that they'd mention was the quality of light. I wonder if my relationship with looking at light really started here, rather than when I decided to pursue photography.
And while the decorated ceilings aren't fitting with modern trends, it's far more interesting to look at than the plain white boxes of modern housing.
It's hard to put into words exactly what it is about selling a family house that makes it so affecting. It's not like a death in the family that leaves you devastated and in shock. But it is a lingering feeling that something isn't quite right. Like something is missing. You can forget for a while when you're distracted but it comes back when your mind is at rest. I've no doubt that feeling will fade as time goes by, as feelings are inclined to do.
I've often used photography as a sort of therapy. It started with the project about my Dad and continued through my fiance's illness and onto this. The house played a large role in the project about my Dad and I don't think it would have been nearly as effective as it was if the house had gone a year earlier.
I'm glad, looking back that I had the chance to get round and have this last look at the house, before it became home to someone else. Even more glad that I have these photos. I've never photographed my own house before. It was always the setting for something else, whether that was family photos at Christmas or a photoshoot with a friend. So it was nice to put the old gal centre stage, for once.
